He wrote: "For 15 million people, attackers accessed two sets of information - name and contact details (phone number, email, or both, depending on what people had on their profiles)". The company says passwords weren't stolen, instead, the hackers took account access "tokens" that allowed them to log in.

Facebook cut the number of affected users from its original estimate after investigators reviewed activity on accounts that may have been affected. While Russian agents had used Facebook and other social media to incite conflict before the 2016 election, domestic sources of false or misleading posts have jumped into the fray, the company said.

Originally Facebook said 50 million accounts could have been affected, but they did not know if they had been misused.

The vulnerability the hackers exploited existed from July 2017 through late last month, when Facebook noticed an unusual increase in use of its "view as" feature.

The "view as" feature allows users to check their privacy settings by giving them a glimpse of what their profile looks like to others. With an access token, an attacker could take over your account and use it as if they were you.

The social network apologized for the incident in a statement, explained the measures it was taking to protect possibly affected users and said law enforcement authorities had been alerted.

The most immediate way to check whether your account was affected is to visit the Facebook Help Center. In response to hack, the company built coding tools for third-party developers that can help them identify whether their users may have been impacted by the attack, Rosen said. There had been concerns about whether hackers could access outside apps that use Facebook login credentials, but that turns out not to have been the case.

Facebook did not rule out the possibility of smaller-scale attacks and said it would continue to investigate.

The hackers used an automated program to move from account to account and harvest the data quickly.

Facebook is quick to point out that this breach did not reach Messenger itself, or Messenger Kids, Instagram, or a plethora of other Facebook-owned platforms and services.

Our investigation is still ongoing, but based on what we've learned so far, the attackers did not gain access to information associated with your Facebook account. It determined that it was an attack on September 25.

Facebook said it took a precautionary step of resetting "access tokens" for another 40 million accounts which had accessed the "view as" function.

What can affected Facebook users do?

Facebook has also advised affected users to not entertain calls from numbers they don't recognise.

It had invalidated the access tokens of nearly 90 million accounts that it suspected could be affected by the vulnerability. Between the Cambridge Analytica scandal and a number of smaller incidents that followed once Facebook started investigating all third-party apps using its APIs this past spring, as well as the newly disclosed vulnerability, the company is now facing heavy scrutiny over its data management practices.

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